How to use a Helm chart hosted in a Docker Registry as a Spinnaker pipeline Artifact

Question

I'm attempting to use a Docker Registry to host Helm charts (see https://helm.sh/docs/topics/registries/). We use Spinnaker to Bake the Helm charts and deploy the resulting manifest.

We have it set up so that the Helm chart is one of the Artifacts in the Configuration step of the pipeline. When we set it up so that we reference the helm chart in the docker image field using the format {host}/{org}/{imagename}:{tag} with the appropriate docker-registry's account selected we get an Failed on startup: Unmatched expected artifact ExpectedArtifact.

Are we approaching this the right way? Would Spinnaker even support pulling a Helm chart from a Docker Registry?

It seems plausible we could introspect the manifest of that Docker Registry entry, get the sha256 of the blob for the helm chart and directly call the docker-registry blobs endpoint (https://docs.docker.com/registry/spec/api/#pulling-an-image) but that seems very roundabout and not obvious which helm chart we're looking at.

Answer 1

This is totally possible and it might just be a configuration issue in how you've set up the pipeline. In your configuration stage you want to include the artifact and then have a bake from manifest stage before the deploy stage. Hopefully this link helps: https://spinnaker.io/guides/user/kubernetes-v2/deploy-helm/#configure-the-bake-manifest-stage and you can always reach out in https://spinnakerteam.slack.com/ for more help.